by Jamie Shaw
But it won’t matter. Danica’s tears have always meant more than my honesty. Like the Christmas she wouldn’t let me play with her toy jeweler because she said there weren’t enough rhinestones to go around. Or the Easter I couldn’t use any of the pink egg paint because she said she needed it all for herself. So I won’t beg, and I won’t cry, and I won’t even tell my uncle about her breaking my computer, because there’s no point—computers are as replaceable to him as number two pencils. Meaningless: my feelings will be meaningless. And in the end, he’ll decide that if Danica doesn’t want to share this town, she doesn’t need to. He’ll never understand how much playing with that jeweler meant to me.
The bed shifts with Mike’s weight for what must be the hundredth time, carrying my thoughts to someplace closer. I don’t think he’s slept yet either, judging by how much he’s been moving around. Lying next to him in the pitch black, I’ve been acutely aware of every shift, every turn, every deep breath.
“I can’t sleep,” his quiet voice confirms, though I’m sure it’s for entirely different reasons. I can’t sleep because it hurts to be this close to him. It’s a tightness in my chest. It’s a cramp in my fingers. It’s the torture of being so near, but so, so far. It’s been easier to let my mind drift to the future than to be here, now, in his bed, with him close enough to touch. I don’t know if I’ve spent mere minutes struggling to breathe evenly next to him, or if it’s been hours, but it feels like hours. It feels like days. Weeks.
“Why not?” I ask.
“Can’t get comfortable.”
I roll onto my side to face him under light blankets, and even though I wouldn’t be able to see my own hand in front of my face right now, I can sense the distance between us. “Do you want to switch sides?”
“No,” Mike says, and the bed shifts again, dipping close to me. I know for certain that if I reached out even a little right now, he’d be right there. I could touch him.
“Are you sure?” I whisper, and my pillow moves. Mike’s warm breath grazes my cheek when he answers me.
“Yeah.” His voice is quiet, softer than the pillow we’re sharing. “This feels better.”
“Okay,” I say, my skin thrumming with the nearness of him. It waits to be touched—for him to wrap his arm around me, or pull me close, or slide forward until his body is pressed tight against mine. But instead, he lies agonizing inches away, bringing my nerve endings to life with every single breath he takes.
If I didn’t have to leave soon, maybe I would reach out. Maybe I’d find the shirt hanging loose over his hard stomach, and I’d fist it in my hands. Maybe I’d draw him to me and risk rejection to find his lips in the dark. Maybe in the dark, he’d kiss me back.
If I didn’t have to leave.
If I didn’t have to leave.
For tonight, I close my eyes, and on a shared pillow, I let my breath mingle with his, and I try to have sweet dreams.
Chapter 23
It’s almost worse: not getting the call. It means I’m constantly checking to make sure my ringer is on. It means my phone is glued to my hand. It means my nerves are on edge, my head kind of hurts, and my stomach is very unsure of itself.
In Mike’s kitchen, I flip an omelet in a pan and turn my head to the side for a breath of non–egg scented air. This morning, I rolled silently out from beneath his covers as soon as the clock on my phone changed from 5:58 to 5:59 to 6:00, and I helped myself to a quick rinse-off in his hall shower. After brushing my teeth with a toothpaste-painted finger, I sat at his kitchen table weighing all of my options—and then I decided to cook, because cooking is easier than thinking.
Now I’m standing at his stove doing both. I know Danica is playing games, but I have no idea how long she plans on playing them. Do I go on the offensive? Call my uncle and explain things myself? No . . . because what if Mike’s right? What if I’m wrong? What if she’s really not going to go through with her threat to ruin my life?
Yeah, right. Since when has Danica ever missed an opportunity like that? Even if I groveled at her feet right now, she’d use it as an opportunity to stomp my face into the dirt.
“Good morning,” Mike says, and I look over my shoulder to see him scratching his head and yawning as he walks into the kitchen. His hair is sticking up on the side from the pillow we shared last night, and I catalog the image to take home with me: sleepy-eyed Mike Madden with bedhead and slept-in clothes. Then I turn back around before I do something stupid, like walk over to straighten his hair.
“I’m making breakfast,” I announce, flipping the eggs, pushing them around in the pan—anything to keep from glancing over my shoulder again. So what if we shared the same bed? We’re still just friends. He’s still my cousin’s ex. He’s still a rock star. He’s still untouchable.
I still have to move back home.
“You eat eggs?”
My breathing stalls when Mike’s voice sounds from right behind me, and my whole body stiffens when his chest brushes against my back. I glance up at him over my shoulder, momentarily losing myself in those big brown eyes. While I search for my voice, he adds, “I thought vegetarians didn’t eat eggs.”
“Some do,” I manage. “But I don’t . . . These are for you.”
The sleep seems to clear from Mike’s eyes, the sun rising on his expression. “How’d you know I’d be up?”
“I didn’t,” I say, and when I reach over and pop open the microwave, he chuckles. He removes the plate stacked with two already cooked omelets, and then he grabs a fork and butter knife from a drawer and sits at the kitchen table.
“It’s a good thing I’m hungry.”
“They’re probably terrible,” I warn as I flip the third omelet in its pan. “I haven’t made eggs in forever.”
“I’m sure they’re amazing,” he says, and I glance over my shoulder to see him carving off his first bite.
“Would you tell me if they weren’t?”
Mike shovels the bite into his mouth and smiles as he chews, shaking his head no. When he swallows, I ask, “Well?”
“Amazing,” he repeats, and his teasing forces me to turn away to hide my smile.
I stand there wondering if he could do that for Danica—if he could find her in the middle of a storm and make her forget it was raining. And if he could, I wonder why she would ever give that up, why she wouldn’t fight tooth and nail to keep him.
For a moment, I think I can almost understand why she lost her mind and broke my computer and trashed my room yesterday. But the moment passes, and I shake my head, and I remember she’s a psychotic bitch.
“So,” Mike says, and when he hesitates before finishing, I know what’s coming next. “Have you heard from your cousin yet . . . ?”
I must have checked my phone five hundred times this morning—for a call from my uncle, for a text from Danica, for a call from the local fire department letting me know that she burned the rest of my belongings on the front lawn of our apartment. But five hundred times, there was nothing. Except one text, from Dee, asking if I got laid yet. It had a time-stamp of 7 a.m., and since I’m guessing she set her alarm solely to ask me that question, I responded by telling her to go back to bed.
Now, resting the spatula on the counter, I pat my back pockets for my phone. One, then the other. Then the right one again, the front ones, the left one, the back ones a third time. “Shit.” I spin around, scanning the counters, the tables. “Do you see my phone?”
Mike stands up to help me look for it as I anxiously search the living room, the bathroom, the bedroom. When we meet in the kitchen again, both of us are empty-handed.
“Do you want me to call it?” he asks, already moving his thumbs over the screen of his phone.
I take one last look around the kitchen before nodding. “Yeah, I think my ringer is on.”
A couple more seconds pass, and my ringtone begins going off somewhere in house. I head to the living room again and lose its trail while Mike heads down the hallway leading to the back of the
house.
“I think it’s in here,” he shouts just before the linen closet clicks open. Just a simple click, and my eyes flash wide with terror.
“WAIT!” I beg as I race for the hallway. My socks slip on the hardwood floor, but I force my useless feet to keep slipping and sliding in a desperate attempt to beat Mike to my phone. I’m a banana-peeled cartoon character, panicked as I scream, “WAIT, DON’T!”
One second, I’m careening toward the back of the open closet door. The next, that door is swinging shut and Mike is staring down at my phone. I slide to a stop two feet away from him, cursing the day I was born. I must have dropped my phone into the hamper when I threw my dirty towels in there after my shower, and now the corner of Mike’s mouth is slowly tugging up, up, up while he stares down at it. When his eyes meet mine, they’re full of mirth that makes me want to drop dead right where I’m standing.
“Sexy as Fuck, huh?”
Dee’s name for him in my phone. God hates me. God really, really hates me.
“Dee did that!” I insist, knowing damn well that my burning cheeks aren’t helping my case. My shitty excuse does nothing to erase the smug amusement from Mike’s face.
“Then why are you freaking out?”
My tongue is in so many knots, I just stand there like an idiot.
“Just admit it, Hailey,” Mike teases as he offers me my phone. “You think I’m hot.”
It nearly drops as I tug it out of his grasp. “Whatever.”
I’m walking away from him, wishing I had drowned in that stupid pond back when I had the chance, when Mike says, “What do you think is hot about me?”
“Why don’t you ask Dee?” I counter, and Mike chuckles as I continue my walk of shame back to his burnt-to-a-crisp eggs. I want to hide in the pantry, or bang my face against a wall, or stick my head in the oven. Instead, I have to keep pretending that I’m not the most mortified I’ve ever been in my entire freaking life.
I turn off the burner to the stove and continue facing away from Mike, checking my phone while I wait for my cheeks to stop melting off. There are no missed calls or texts from my uncle, not that this day could possibly get any worse. But really, I’m just pretending to care about my phone while I relive the past sixty seconds, wishing I could have run a little faster and tackled Mike to the ground before he opened that damn closet door.
“If you tell me why you think I’m hot,” he negotiates from the entryway to the kitchen, “I’ll tell you why I think you’re hot.”
I glance over my shoulder at him before I can help it, because did he just say I’m hot? But Mike isn’t smiling like he’s joking or playing or lying. He’s just leaning against the jamb—all six-foot-one, rock star hair, panty-melting eyes—waiting for me to answer him. His gaze doesn’t shy from mine.
“Stop joking,” I order.
“Who’s joking?”
When I turn away from him again, even the tips of my ears are burning. A hot flush creeps up my neck, and I know he can see it. His footsteps move closer as I scoop his burnt omelet onto a plate, and when I turn back around, he’s right there, utterly serious, waiting for me to say something.
“I have to pee,” I squeak, and I thrust the plate at him.
This is my great response to Mike hitting on me. Is he hitting on me?! I just announced I have to pee, and now I’m rushing from the kitchen. Oh my God, what the hell am I even doing?!
“Your lips,” Mike calls after me, and I freeze in my tracks and look over my shoulder. His eyes lock with mine, making my heart jackhammer so violently in my chest that I’m sure both of us can hear it. I hold his gaze for as long as I can—a split second—and then I turn back around to finish escaping to the bathroom.
Chapter 24
In Mike’s bathroom mirror, my reflection pokes her bottom lip, wondering if Mike could have been telling the truth: if maybe he thinks I have attractive lips . . . They’re not particularly pink. They’re not particularly pouty. They’re not particularly anything.
Poke. Squish. Poke. Poke.
Amber eyes stare back at me, eyebrows knitting.
I have to pee. Smooth, Hailey, smooth. I close my eyes and shake my head at myself. I have to pee. In the history of awkward girls everywhere, has there ever been a more pathetic response to flirting?
Was Mike flirting with me?
I remember the look on his face when I glanced over my shoulder, and I continue prodding at my bottom lip while the edge of the sink presses a line into my shins—the price of being five feet tall in a giant’s home. My reflection met me only after I scaled the sink like a miniature King Kong and roosted here, where we could frown at each other in earnest.
The past two days have felt like a nightmare and a dream.
Danica kicking me out: nightmare. Mike teaching me to play the drums: dream. Waiting for a call from my uncle to ruin my whole life: nightmare. Sharing a pillow with the only man who has ever made me spark: dream. Him telling me that my lips are hot: confusing.
Confusing, confusing, confusing.
It’s not that I’ve never had a guy find me attractive before. I got asked out often enough back home, and I know quite a few guys found me pretty . . . Not Danica pretty, but . . . Hailey pretty. Small-town pretty. Hand-me-down pretty.
Definitely not rock-star pretty. Not pretty enough for Mike to look at me the way he did.
But there it was: that look. It’s cataloged clearly in my mind, along with the way his eyes looked in the soft light of his bedroom last night, the way his hair stood up this morning.
My teeth punish my bottom lip as I continue frowning at my wild-haired reflection. My cheeks are a little too pale. My eyes are a little too big. My eyebrows are a little too thick. All of me is a little too little.
I’m uselessly trying to tame my hair with one of Mike’s combs when the doorbell rings. My hand stills as the bells echo through the house, and I hear the front door open. Then voices: Mike’s and—
I round the corner to the living room and see her: her perfect reddish-brown hair, her periwinkle cashmere sweater, the massive gift basket in her arms.
“What the hell?” Danica snarls while I stand there with a comb stuck in my hair.
“What are you doing here?” Mike asks, like it isn’t the first time he’s voiced the question, and Danica’s eyebrows slam together as she scowls up at him.
“What is she doing here?”
“You kicked her out.”
Danica’s face whips in my direction just after I tear the comb free from my hair. “You told me you weren’t sleeping with him! You fucking liar! You’re such a fucking—”
“I’m not—” I start, but Mike’s voice booms over mine.
“Don’t you finish that goddamn sentence,” he snaps, and the crazy look in Danica’s eyes immediately clears. She stares up at him like a pit bull that’s just realized it has a master, and Mike stares down at her like he’d like to see her put to sleep.
Danica, ever calculating, takes a moment to collect herself, and in that moment, she notices the couch. She takes in the messy sheets, the wrinkled blanket, the bed pillow on the end, and she snaps them together like puzzle pieces. The final picture tells her that I slept in the living room, that I’m not a threat, that Mike is still hers for the taking.
She makes a production of taking a calming breath and tucking her hair behind her ear. “I’m sorry.” She locks eyes with me, and mine narrow. “I’m sorry, Hailey. I just get really jealous.” She laughs to herself, softly at first, and then a full-on giggle. “Look at me, I’m a mess. I just—” She bats her eyelashes up at Mike. “I’ve just been going crazy over the thought of losing you. I know I should have brought this sooner, but—” She lifts the gift basket as an offering. “Look, I made you a get well basket. It has your favorite soup, and your favorite cookies, and—”
“I’m not sick anymore,” Mike informs her mid-sentence, and Danica frowns.
“Did Hailey give you my card with the other basket?” she asks, an
d Mike lifts an eyebrow.
“You mean the one that she signed your name in? I know your handwriting, Danica. You had nothing to do with that card.”
“But the whole basket was my idea! I—”
“What?” Mike interrupts. “You what? You want a medal for sending someone else to the store to throw shit in a basket?”
“Why are you being so mean?” Danica pouts, and Mike sighs and rubs a line between his eyes.
“I just don’t want to do this anymore.” He swings his finger between himself and my cousin. “There’s nothing here. I’m sorry . . . I had a crush on you when we were kids, but that’s all it ever was.”
Something tells me I should give them privacy, that I should back away slowly and disappear. But I’m too busy watching Danica’s knuckles whiten as she strangles the handle of her care basket, and then her viper eyes are pinning me in place.
“Is this because of her?” she snarls while glaring at me.
“No.”
“Bullshit,” Danica spits. She glowers up at him. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Why are you doing this?” he asks.
“Doing what?!”
“Fighting so hard.” Mike’s voice is tired but steady. “There’s nothing here to fight for.”
“Why do you keep saying that!” she shrieks. “You’re only saying that because of her!”
“This isn’t about her,” Mike insists.
“This is ALL about her. Tell me you don’t like her!”
“Danica—”
“Tell me you don’t fucking want her, Mike! I’m not blind! You think I don’t see it?!”
“This is about me and you—”
“Say it!” Danica’s face turns red, her voice making my ears ring. “Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t have feelings for my fucking cousin!”
Mike quiets, hesitating, and then his eyes find mine across the room. Danica is staring at him, and he is staring at me, and I’m holding my breath when he says, “I’m in love with her.”